Many businesses use barcode technology to accurately and expediently gather data. For example, a delivery service provider, such as the United States Postal Service (USPS), may use barcodes to rapidly identify destinations of delivery items. In another example, a grocery store retailer may use barcodes to identify products that it sells.
A barcode typically includes a series of parallel adjacent bars and spaces. Predetermined width of spaces may be used to encode data into an image. To decode information contained in a barcode, a scanning device, such as a bar reader, may be moved across the image of a barcode from one side to another. As a scanning device moves across the image, the barcode width pattern may be analyzed by the barcode decoder recovering the original encoded data.
Barcodes come in many different formats. Exemplary barcode formats include Universal Product Code (UPC), PostNet, Code 39, PLANETT™, Code 128, Codabar, etc.
In order to utilize or facilitate the services provided by a delivery service provider, a user may need to generate and print barcodes at a client computer associated with the delivery service provider. Currently, in order to generate and print barcodes, a client computer may utilize a special font or software such as BarTender, so that when a series of numbers or letters are typed in, they are encoded to a barcode. Such a font or software, however, needs to be resident on the client computer. In the case that a user needs to generate different types of barcodes using the same client computer, multiple fonts or barcode-specific software may need to be resident on the client computer. These additional fonts or software may consume valuable memory on client computers.
In a situation where the users are employees of a delivery service provider, in order to ensure consistent and uniform performance by all its employees, a delivery service provider may need to install the same barcode-specific software on client computers operated by its employees. Having special barcode printing software such as, for example, BarTender, installed on each of these client computers may require coordination of downloading of software updates in a timely manner. Having barcode printing software installed on each user computer may also present interchangeability problems if a hardware upgrade is required. It is therefore desirable to provide a method and a system for providing a barcode image generated from one centralized location to users for subsequent printing without installing special software or font on a client computer.